ASTP: Agent-Based Secure and Trustworthy Packet-Forwarding Protocol for eHealth

Security has been recognized as a key issue for the expansion of eHealth application, where highly sensitive patient´s medical data are routed through a non-secure wireless network. In this paper, we look into the various security and privacy requirements for the eHealth application and propose an agent-based secure and trustworthy packet-forwarding Protocol (ASTP) considering the neighbor nodes previous and recent activities. ASTP incorporated with proper security tools that enhanced the overall performance of a cooperative multi-hop wireless network used for an eHealth application. The proposed protocol can successfully detects malicious nodes and the information is used and shared to the neighbors to avoid co-operating with them either for data forwarding, aggregation or any other cooperative function. Patient privacy is maintained by using an renewable pseudo-identity. Finally, security analysis and experimental results demonstrate that ASTP improves the average packet delivery ratio and maintains the require security and privacy at the cost of an acceptable communication delay.